Before the Day of the Dead celebrations in late October and early November, there is another spectacular event in Mexico City. Although lesser-known in the United States, it’s the kickoff to the Day of the Dead Season. This was the 18th Monumental Alebrije Parade (pronounced ah-lay-bree-hay) held on October 17, 2026. Alebrijes are brightly painted creatures, unique, artistically invented chimeras, with parts from various animals, imaginary beasts, and people.
Anything at all is possible with these creatures, with no limits except the imagination. As you see the parade, not even the bizarre creations of AI have anything on them. (Although you can see many videos of them that have been AI-enhanced for no apparent reason.)
Following the ringing of a Cathedral bell at noon, nearly 300 enormous, colorful alebrijes paraded down the main square to the Angel of Independence monument on Paseo de la Reforma. Since 2007, this spectacle of floats has been an instant hit and became an annual tradition.
The Alebrijes Herald the Day of the Dead
In 2007, the parade had 35 figures and around 200,000 spectators. This year, there were nearly 300 creations. Throughout the season leading up to the Day of the Dead festivities, there may be over 2 million local and international visitors.
But where did the alebrijes come from? It’s become a cultural myth, as fantastic as the rainbow-colored creatures themselves. And what do they mean?
As Daniel VE explained (see video below), there isn’t a single meaning. Some say the alebrijes represent supernatural spiritual guides and protectors, connecting to the world of dreams. Next, we’ll look at the story from the man credited with inventing them.
Video by Daniel VE:
Mexico City’s Pedro Linares López and Family
Looking at their varied, whimsical appearances, you would guess the alebrijes arrived from a dream. As the story goes, that’s literally where they come from, including even their name. It’s often said that artists and inventors receive their best ideas from the ether. And so it was for their creator, Pedro Linares López, born in Mexico City in 1906. Three generations of master Mexican folk artists, the Linares family, gradually came to fame.
Linares (1906- 1992) became a Cartonería craftsman like his father and grandfather, working in the markets near Mexico City. Cartonería is a traditional Mexican paper sculpture similar to papier-mâché, made from recycled paper, cardboard, wire, and engrudo (a natural flour-and-water glue). Learning the techniques from his family, he became a Master Cartoner recognized worldwide after 45 years of honing his craft. Sometimes, he would work 12 to 14 hours a day, with the busiest times during Holy Week.
According to demand, he made piñatas, carnival masks, Day of the Dead skeletal figures called calaveras, and so-called Judas figures (more on those later). The family’s creations influenced figures seen throughout the Mexican Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) holiday.
According to Miguel Linares, the family’s style was heavily influenced by artist Guadalupe Posada’s engravings, which likewise rose to fame. (Today, his engraving of La Calavera Catrina is most widely known.)
For most of his life, Linares was hard at work with traditional creations. But in 1945, at age 30, Linares changed direction. According to the stories which have become a modern-day mythology, he saw the alebrijes while sick in a fever dream.
After waking, he recounted encountering strange and scary creatures.
Images below and featured image are screenshots via YouTube/Daniel VE
Where did Alebrijes Come From?
In preparing this article, I sought to determine exactly where the idea of alebrijes originated. Now a modern myth, it can be hard to discern what is real and what is not. But isn’t that the essence of alebrijes? Here’s what I found:
In a famous 1975 documentary, “Pedro Linares Artesano Cartonero” (see YouTube), we see the artist talk about working with the alebrijes.
“The Alebrijes were conceived, you see, through certain revelations I had; visions of the dead, of mischievous spirits of devils, macabre things. These things inspired me to create figures like the ones we make now,” he said.
In other scenes, he talked about the creative process. As he constructed the creatures, ideas would come, taking them in new directions.
“The alebrijes were invented. Well, by yours truly. One thinks that one is going to be a figure, right? And as you’re forging it, then other ideas come.”
At another point, he explained that the original creatures he created were considered to be from the afterlife. Although ugly, they also have striking beauty.
“Alebrijes were invented, right? Because of certain revelations I had. Already dead. Already of pingos (mischievous creatures), of devils. Some pretty macabre things, right? We can say. These things made me think about making figures like the ones we make now,” Linares said. “There are figures that are very ugly, very awful, right? But at the same time, they are very beautiful.”
A Vision on His Deathbed, Surrounded by Candles
One month before he passed away at age 85 in 1992, Linares described the alebrijes for The Times.
As he recalled, “I saw them in a dream. They were very ugly and terrifying, and they were coming toward me. I saw all kinds of ugly things.”
According to the article, the dream came near the end of an extended illness in 1945. At the time, he thought he was dying, having suffered from gastric ulcers for 11 years. As he lay in a 24-hour coma, surrounded by candles, he had a vision of the surreal beasts. What he described sounds a bit like a vision from someone who has tried DMT!
After recovering, he began making the creatures as he remembered in his dream. But over decades of making them, buyers influenced how they appeared. Instead of scary, they preferred bright, colorful creations.
“People didn’t want to buy the alebrijes. They were too ugly,” he said. “So I began to change them and make them more colorful.”
Images above and featured image are screenshots via YouTube/Daniel VE
More Alebrijes Details from the Linares Family Archives
In addition to the references above, there are more details about the alebrijes’ origins, passed down through the oral histories of the Linares family. The family’s 2019 heritage declaration, issued by the Mexican Secretariat of Culture, recorded the stories.
As they have recorded, Linares was on his deathbed in Mexico City in 1936 when the alebrijes appeared to him.
“It was 1936 and Pedro Linares López, with a perforated gastric ulcer, was delirious on his deathbed in Mexico City, in an almost convulsive state of agitation. He would later say that the peaceful natural landscape he had first dreamed of had suddenly been harassed by nightmare animals: a donkey with wings, a rooster with bull horns and a lion with a dog’s head. What’s more, they were shouting “alebrijes! alebrijes! alebrijes!”
Then, his brother appeared to him and led him back to the world of the living:
“Pedro Linares, already given up for dead, came to his senses when his now deceased brother told him in his dream that that was not his place yet, and showed him a door through which he returned to the world of the living, to his home and his family.”
Another source explained how Linares was able to give form to the alebrijes thanks to his generational expertise in the craft. Perhaps nobody else could have done what he did.
“During a severe illness, family accounts say, he saw composite animals chanting a word he did not know: alebrijes. Once recovered, he did not search for a dictionary meaning; he gave the word a body. Wire armatures, paper and paste carried tusks, wings, horns and tails into animals absent from zoology. The story matters not only because it is extraordinary, but because the dream never floated free of labor. It entered the world because Linares already possessed an inherited technique and worked long enough to make imagination stand upright.”
Linares Felt a Calling to Make Alebrijes Real
Indeed, when he fully recovered in 1947, Linares felt an obligation to return to his work and make the alebrijes real.
“After a slow recovery and faithful to the world in which he had grown up, populated by magical beings such as the nahuales (humans with the ability to turn into animals, but also animals that guard humans), aluxes and chaneques (elves that guard forests and crops), Linares restarted his work in 1947, convinced that he had returned from the world of the dead with the obligation to make known the creatures that had accompanied him.”
After 28 years of work, the alebrijes finally became world famous with the 1975 documentary by Judith Bronowski. Before that, artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo discovered his surreal work and became admirers and collectors. In 2017, the alebrijes reached new levels of worldwide fame as people saw them in the movie Coco.
And most importantly, and astonishingly, Mexico went on to adopt the alebrijes as part of their culture. What are the odds of such a thing happening? Surely, it’s as if out of a dream, yet now entirely real.
Video shared by Yeudiel L Salguero:
Mexico City Adopts Alebrijes
In October 2019, Mexico City declared the alebrijes part of its cultural heritage. Leonardo Linares made the declaration before the annual parade.
“Pedro Linares López contributed a new purpose to art and culture by revolutionizing paper mache with what he himself called alebrijes,” Linares said at a small ceremony at the beginning of the annual alebrijes parade on Saturday.
Thanks to his tremendous skill at his art, the alebrijes became widely appreciated as fine art pieces.
“In doing so, he created not just the only folk art unique to the old Federal District, he also made it so that they demand the same quality demanded of art in order to be categorized as authentic works of art . . . by which he left a cultural legacy for Mexico and the world.”
Likewise, Mexico City Culture Secretary José Alfonso Suárez del Real declared the imaginative, mythological creatures part of Mexico City’s cultural heritage.
In 1990, Linares was honored with the first Mexican National Prize in Arts and Sciences in the Popular Art and Traditions category. Only two years later, he passed away. In many ways, Pedro Linares López and his family have had an far-reaching impact on the culture of Mexico. After Linares worked for decades, the creatures of his dream have taken on a real life in the imaginations of people around the globe.
Another Tradition Observed by Linares
Cartonería developed during the Spanish conquests with a ritual. People gathered to burn effigies of Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. On Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, people gather in the plazas and light fireworks attached to the Judas figures, a tradition the Linares family also observes.
Originally a medieval European Christian folk tradition, it was called La Quema de Judas (The Burning of Judas). While not associated with the Catholic Church, similar traditions are observed in Greece and several Latin American nations.
The ritual was meant as a symbol of protest and defeating evil, although it arrived from the Spanish who sought to destroy indigenous beliefs and customs.
“By exploding with rockets, evil and betrayal are symbolically destroyed,” researcher Abraham Domínguezwrote. “In the burning of Judas, social evil becomes laughable.”
Along with devil-like, brightly painted Judas figures, there are also Toritos. These are large bulls also loaded with fireworks and set off during festivals.
Modern Judas Figures
Later, after the War of Independence, the Judas effigy ritual lost the strictly religious tone. Instead, the public began depicting hated local figures, politicians, landlords, and Spanish colonizers as devil-like figures. But an 1849 law stipulated that the Judas effigies couldn’t be designed to identify a particular person.
Nevertheless, the figures often do represent identifiable people. In 2015, the Easter street theater made Judases of both US President Obama and Venezuela’s Maduro. At the time, Maduro accused Obama of wanting to invade to control the world’s largest crude oil reserves.
This year, the artists depicted Donald Trump at the Burning of the Judas ritual. As we know, Trump ordered the invasion of Venezuela in January 2026 and captured Maduro and his wife. And indeed, the oil reserves are under the control of the U.S. government and an unnamed private operator. Maduro and his wife remain detained until trial in June, 2027.
The Burning of Judas is held in Mexico City’s La Merced neighborhood, where Pedro Linares López created his Alebrijes. Today, his children and grandchildren continue the traditions.
“This has been handed down from generation to generation,” Leonardo Linares, grandson of Pedro Linares, said of the ritual in 2015. Rather than depicting Judas, anyone deemed “roast-worthy” could be depicted in a figure set ablaze before cheering crowds. “If people don’t like them, if they did something wrong, they’ll be here,” said Leonardo’s son, Luis Pablo Linares.
While alebrijes exist purely in the realm of fantasy, the tradition of burning Judas effigies draws its energy from contemporary reality. Even so, these paper-mâché creations serve as a joyful focal point for communities to gather, laugh, and share an emotional bond.